Onboarding a 401(k) plan sponsor
Setting up a business account with Penelope 401(k)
Penelope is a retirement platform for small businesses, that is expanding the sphere of opportunity to build generational wealth through retirement savings. In 6 months, I designed and launched onboarding and dashboards for both retirement plan sponsors (business owners), and participants (employees).
To truly make retirement savings more accessible, we needed to make these processes as simple as possible.
The plan sponsor’s onboarding required information about their entire employee team as well as making connections to their bank, benefits provider, and payroll systems. This led us to splitting their onboarding into multiple phases while the connections were made.
Phase 1
We used Finch to establish a read-only connection to client’s payroll systems. This connection was a prerequisite for accessing the dashboard, because it would populate information that was required for subsequent steps.
Phase 2
After connecting Finch, we could begin populating employee info. This would normally take a few days, but we could give users tasks to do while we waited for this crucial information.
Interviews with small business owners surfaced the need to only see tasks that needed immediate attention, and to know how much time to commit to them. To meet these needs we broke down setup into the smallest tasks possible, which were only presented when they were necessary. The dashboard for an account in the setup phase had an omnipresent “next steps” section. This is where any tasks to be done would live, or users would see an “in progress” message if setup was incomplete but there were no actions to take.
Phase 3
Once we had employee info, users needed to confirm the info we had and fill the gaps of the info we didn't have. The task of adding employee info was a bigger lift, so it started with a modal that advised users to get the necessary records, and gave users the option to revisit the task another time.
401(k) plans have rules that preclude certain types of employees from participating. This step helped our clients to be sure that they were complying with regulations, and only adding eligible employees to their plans.
Phase 4
Completion of all tasks meant users were good to go! Users were notified of their plan's start date, which allowed for a mandatory 30 day waiting period. After which their 401(k) plan would be up and running.
